When Soviet troops marched into
Hungary and Poland in 1956, I remember watching the agony
unfold on black and white television, a young infomaniac in
the making. One night, I watched with my father's uncle
Jack, an old Hungarian Jew who had no love for the Eastern
Europe he had left behind nearly 50 years before. "I hate to
see the Russians invade," he smiled. "But if they have to
invade anywhere, they picked the right countries."

When Soviet troops marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968, I
had just returned from a week in Prague writing a story
about the Czech reformers. I remember speaking at a campus
rally in Berkeley, where I compared the Soviet Union's
invasion of Czechoslovakia to America's war in Vietnam. How
could anyone in good conscience condemn one and not the
other?

When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan on
Christmas Eve of 1979, I remember jetting off to Pakistan
and from there to Kabul, where the BBC sent me to organize
filming for a prime-time Panorama documentary. I was the
lowly advance man on the team, working under one of our most
senior producers, who knew from the start the story the film
should tell. Just as in the days of Czarist Russia, he
insisted that the Soviets were looking for a warm-water port
on the Indian Ocean from which to challenge "the West."
Years later, former CIA Director Robert Gates and National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed the Carter
administration had begun funding the anti-Soviet mujahedeen
six months before the Soviets invaded. Even more sobering,
Brzezinski had warned Carter at the time, "this aid was
going to induce a Soviet military intervention."

Now,
in response to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili
sending troops into the breakaway region of South Ossetia,
the Russians have sent bombers, ships, tanks and troops
against Georgia. The Europeans then tried to make a clumsy
cease-fire work, while the Bush administration throws fuel
on the fire by sending in American troops on a "vigorous and
ongoing" humanitarian mission "to show to Russia that we can
come to the aid of a European ally, and that we can do it at
will, whenever and wherever we want."

It's déjà vu
all over again, and none have taken greater comfort in the
still-escalating crisis than John McCain, his foreign policy
adviser Randy Scheunemann (whose firm lobbied for the
Georgians) and the same neoconservatives who pushed
Americans to flex our great power muscles in Iraq in even
more disgusting ways than Vladimir Putin has done in
Georgia. Robert Kagan set the tone in The Washington Post,
charging that Putin had "reestablished a virtual czarist
rule in Russia and is trying to restore the country to its
once-dominant role in Eurasia and the world."

Wholeheartedly siding with "my friend Misha Saakashvili,"
McCain then announced on behalf of every American, "We are
all Georgians now" and called for NATO to step in to
"stabilize this dangerous situation." He also repeated his
long-standing demand to bring Georgia into NATO, a position
that the less bellicose Obama is also taking. NATO
membership would commit the United States and its allies to
defend the Georgians against Russia with military force.
This is a life-and-death commitment few Americans would want
to make if anyone took the time to explain it to them.

More sensibly, the French, Germans, and other Europeans have
never been eager to go along with American efforts to extend
NATO membership into the unruly Caucasus, remembering all
too well how the First World War began in the similarly
chaotic Balkans. The Europeans will hardly change their
minds now, having just seen how reckless Saakashvili and his
American supporters can be.

McCain talks grandly of "a
moral commitment" to defend "Georgian democracy." It's heady
stuff, echoing back to November 2003, when Washington helped
stage Georgia's Rose Revolution. The National Endowment for
Democracy, which took over much of American covert funding
from the CIA in 1983, supplied a good part of the cash and
used many of the same nonviolent activists, youth groups and
"civil society" fronts it would subsequently employ in
Ukraine. Sadly, Misha Saakashvili turned out to be just
about as democratic as Putin, manipulating elections, using
force against his opponents and greatly restricting press
freedom during a state of emergency in November 2007. Under
his leadership, Georgia remains famously corrupt, and he has
proved every bit as warm and compassionate toward the
breakaway Ossetians and Abkhasians as Putin has been toward
the Georgians.

As for Washington, it continues to
pursue more material interests (especially the multi-billion
dollar oil and natural gas pipelines that use Georgia to
bypass both Russia and nearby Iran), while American hotheads
like John McCain continue to give Saakashvili the impression
we will back him even as he baits the Russian bear. The
Pentagon supplies and trains the Georgian military, which
sent 2,000 troops to fight in Iraq until Washington flew
them home after the recent hostilities began. And, now, the
Georgians are begging Washington to include them in the new
anti-missile system the Bush administration is building in
Poland and Czech Republic, a supposedly defensive system
that could give the Pentagon a first-strike nuclear
capability against Russia.

Needless to say, the
Russians see all this much as Americans would view Cuban
revolutionary agitators, a Russian anti-missile system and
Chinese military trainers in Mexico and Canada. But, hey,
who cares? We're the only remaining superpower and we don't
have to worry about how the Russians feel until it's much
too late.

*************

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve
Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a
magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and
works in
France.

This is an opportunity for you as one of the 4 million potential funders and recipients of a Universal Basic Income to collectively consider the issue:1. Is UBI is a desirable policy for New Zealand; and2. How should a UBI system work in practice. More>>

The National party has announced its youth justice policy, which includes a controversial plan for recidivist serious youth offenders to be hit over the head with a comically large rubber mallet. More>>

ALSO:

It's been brought to my attention that Labour's new campaign slogan is "Let's do this". A collective call to action. A mission. I myself was halfway out of the couch before I realised I wasn't sure what it was I was supposed to do. More>>

ALSO:

Ordinary citizens have had very few venues where they can debate and discuss as to what they believe has led to the crisis in affordable housing and how we might begin to address this. The HiveMind on affordable housing was about redressing the balance. More>>

ALSO:

This is an opportunity for you as one of the 4 million guardians of our common water resources to help us find mutually agreeable solutions to the critical task of collectively managing these resources for health and sustainability. More>>